Non-Review: “Micro,” Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

I do a “non-review” when I couldn’t finish a book. I won’t review it on Amazon or GoodReads, but I don’t mind telling you here why I chose not to finish. If there’s one thing I’ve found over the years, it’s that there are too many good books to spend my time finishing a book that I can’t get into.

Micro: A Novel is by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston. In it, a handful of students with various bio-related specialties get propositioned by an amazing young company called Nanigen. Peter, one of the students (specializing in envenomation), is brother to Eric, one of the bigwigs at Nanigen. Just as the group of students is going to visit Nanigen, Eric dies amid mysterious circumstances. Peter immediately finds evidence implicating Alyson, Eric’s girlfriend and another Nanigen powerhouse, and decides to confront her and her boss.

Naturally that goes horribly awry. The eeeevil bad guy is all-too-happy to explain himself to the camera and to get rid of the pesky students in as complicated and prone-to-mishaps a way possible. Alyson is shown as pathetic, going along with the bad guy in his psychotic plans because she kinda still likes him, or something like that.

All of this was kind of ‘meh,’ but what really did it for me was having the bad guy shrink the students down to roughly half an inch high. This book doesn’t read as though it’s supposed to be a comedy, but I think there’s a reason why every movie that’s had this as its premise has been at least partially a comedy. It’s a silly premise. It just is.

My Kindle tells me I made it through 26% of the book before giving up on it.